


Water of the Womb

by thefairyknight



Series: Raising Sarah [2]
Category: Terminator Genisys (2015)
Genre: (Brief) Sexual Harrassment, Angst, Family, Gen, Growing Up, Injury, Kidfic, Menstruation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 02:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4330824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairyknight/pseuds/thefairyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah is thirteen, sitting on the passenger seat of a stolen car, the first time blood soaks through her shorts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water of the Womb

 

 

Sarah is thirteen, sitting on the passenger seat of a stolen car, the first time blood soaks through her shorts.

She gasps when she sees and reaches over, smacking the side of Pops’ arm.

“Pops! Pops, I’m bleeding!”

The car pulls over, and Sarah climbs out, and there’s a flurry of confusion and questions.

“You have begun menstruating,” Pops tells her.

“What the heck is ‘menstruating’?!” she asks, wondering if she’s going to die. But Pops isn’t acting like she’s in danger. He isn’t moving to get the med kit or declaring that they’ll need to find a hospital or doing anything other than standing there, staring at her.

“It is a normal function of the human reproductive cycle. Your uterus is shedding its internal lining. The blood is facilitating the process by carrying mucosal tissue through a small opening in your cervix and out through your vagina,” he explains. “This should not be unexpected.”

“What?” she demands, still confused, but she’s calming down a little bit, now. “Are you… are you trying to tell me this is _normal?”_

“The human uterus sheds it’s lining on an approximate monthly basis, after the onset of pubertal growth. It is normal,” Pops confirms.

_“Monthly basis?!”_ Sarah asks, her voice going high as she stares at him in horror. “How long does this last for?”

Pops doesn’t even blink.

“That depends on what part of the process you are inquiring after,” he replies.

“The whole process!” she snaps.

“Fertility cycles can range between twenty-one to thirty-five days in adults, and twenty-one to forty-five days in teenagers. Bleeding will occur at a relatively continuous rate for up to seven days within the cycle. The cycle will repeat until the onset of menopause, which typically occurs in women between the ages of forty-five and fifty.”

Sarah gapes at him.

“Are you telling me I’m going to be bleeding out of – out of _here_ once a month for a _whole week_ until I’m in my _forties?!”_

“Yes,” Pops replies.

This is awful. This is a nightmare.

“Why didn’t you warn me?!” she demands.

“I had assumed you were aware of your own body’s biological functions,” Pops says.

The last ounce of restraint she has left goes flying to the wind, and Sarah all but screams in frustration, reaching out to punch at his unyielding stomach.

“Where the heck would I learn about this, Pops, if _you_ didn’t tell me?” she yells, overwhelmed by the sinking sense of dread in her gut. Blood. More blood. She’s never going to get away from it, is she? It’s greasing the rails of her whole life, past and future and everything in between.

Pops looks down at her.

“It appears I did not consider all of the appropriate variables,” he replies.

Sarah fists one hand into his shirt, and lets out a breath, and rests her forehead against him for a second. He stands there, like he usually does, neither returning the gesture nor pushing her away.

“So what are we supposed to do about it?” she grumbles, after a minute. “I can’t go around bleeding everywhere, and I can’t seem to hold it in, either.” For a second she’s scared, then, worried that this means she’ll have to be sequestered somewhere, trapped in one of their bunkers or safe zones for weeks. But there’s gotta be some way that other women deal with this, right? If it’s normal?

“We will acquire supplies,” Pops decides. “There are medical bandages in the first aid kit. You may use them to absorb the blood until then.”

Right. Of course. Get supplies. Make do with temporary solutions until then. Use a lot of bandages.

Story of her life.

 

~

 

Sarah is fourteen the first time a grown man hits on her.

She goes into the gas station to pay for their fill up and grab a couple of candy bars. Pops is waiting in the car. Their last brush with the T-1000 left him with two jagged scrapes up and down the sides of this face, glinting silver, and all of their attempts to wrap them just result in him looking like some kind of horrible burn victim who should be in a hospital ward somewhere.

It’s conspicuous as hell, so he’s laying low. Which means Sarah gets to do all the running around and paying for stuff and talking to people – not that she doesn’t generally handle most of that stuff anyway. Pops is slowly developing a set of skills that could, potentially, be called ‘social’, but he still tends to come across as hostile and creepy ninety percent of the time.

When she goes to pay, there’s a guy already at the counter, buying cigarettes. He gives her a glance, and then a slow up-and-down look that makes her skin crawl. His eyes flit to her face, and her nerves go on high-alert, the way they do when she sees someone moving with the unhesitating efficiency of a body made of liquid metal, or whenever someone stares at her or Pops a little too hard, like maybe they’re thinking about calling Crimestoppers or something.

Except, she isn’t thinking this guy is a T-1000, or that he recognizes her at all.

He leans against the counter, rather than clearing off with his cigarettes, and she pays quickly. One of her hands reflexively slides down to the gun under her shorts.

“Little late to be out all by yourself,” he says, with a friendly smile.

Sarah scowls back at him.

“Pops is waiting in the car,” she replies.

“ _Pops_ , huh? That your daddy or your _daddy?_ ” the guy asks, glancing back at the cashier, as if they’re sharing a joke or something. The cashier doesn’t smile back. He’s busy counting out her change.

“Keep it,” she decides, and takes her candy bars, and leaves as quickly as she can.

“Whoa, hold up! Don’t be scared!” the guy calls after her. He follows her out into the parking lot. “It was just a joke, honey. Can’t you take a joke?”

It’s dark, except for the street lights, and the glow of the gas station’s sign. Pops parked in the darkest spot, so the metal on his face wouldn’t catch any glint from the lights.

“Come on, now. You’re real pretty. Anyone ever told you that before? You got a nice set of tits.”

“Buzz off,” she snaps as she speeds up, heading for the truck, heart beating fast behind her ribs. She hears the engine start.

“Fucking cunt!” the guy shouts after her.

The driver’s side door of the truck opens.

Sarah thinks she should probably say something. Like ‘don’t shoot him’ or ‘just ignore it’ or something like that, maybe. Like what she normally says when she can see that an awkward social encounter has the potential to explode into a sudden fit of violence because of Pops misunderstanding or seeing a threat where there isn’t one. She should probably say something just so that there won’t be another police report about them, floating around somewhere.

She keeps quiet as she climbs into the passenger seat, even as she hears the distinctive _boom_ of a shotgun, and a wail of pain. There’s a flurry of panicked cursing. She looks through the passenger’s side mirror and sees the creep on the concrete, staring at the mangled meat of his leg.

Pops gets back into the truck.

“Let’s go,” she requests, wrapping her arms around herself.

Pops looks at her and then does as she asks, backing up dangerously close to the guy bleeding on the pavement. Pained cursing turns to panicked gibbering for a few seconds, but then they pull out, and leave the scene behind them.

Sarah’s skin doesn’t want to stop crawling.

After a minute of driving in silence, Pops reaches over and turns on the radio.

She waits for him to find a news station, but he doesn’t, leaving it to blare _Barracuda_ into the truck cab instead.

He never turns on the radio for music. She’s the one who does that. It’s enough to make her glance questioningly at him.

“Pops?” she asks. “…You want me to put it on the news?”

“No. Seatbelt,” he reminds her, and she blinks, a little dazedly, distracted enough that she forgets the oil slick of self-conscious discomfort that’s still seeping down her spine. She clicks her seatbelt into place and listens to the song.

By the time it’s finished, she isn’t hugging herself anymore.

 

~

 

Sarah is fifteen and in agony.

She’s in the middle of a growth spurt. Not a huge one, but enough to make her joints ache and her calves tender. Her abdomen feels like it’s full of snakes, all biting and twisting themselves into knots and angrily trying to escape. There’s a gash on her forehead from where a piece of shrapnel hit her, and a tourniquet around her leg, and a bullet that Pops is currently digging out of her thigh.

They’re camped out an abandoned bunker. The concrete’s cold at her back and the air’s cold in her lungs and she fights to keep it in, tough it out, but her nerves sing with pain and all she wants to do is _scream._

She doesn’t. Not when the bloodied bullet goes _tink_ onto the floor, not when Pops stitches her up, not when they both go still at the sound of an engine outside, tires crunching over concrete, slowly but surely, in this place in the middle of nowhere where no one else should be.

Pops finishes quickly and scoops her up. She grabs a gun off of the table, checks for bullets, swallows the rush of pained nausea that makes her want to vomit.

“Is it him?” she whispers.

“Uncertain,” Pops replies, and hits the lights. The bunker goes dark. Sarah can’t see, but he can. He carries her into a far corner of the room, sets her down, and for a second she can discern a slight gleam of red, two points, dimmed by sunglasses but noticeable in the pitch black. Pops’ eyes.

Then he turns away from her, towards the entrance, and they wait.

She hears the footsteps, shuffling and scuffling, several of them, and some part of her is already starting to ease up by the time she hears the voices. Boyish. Laughter and playful insults and clinking bottles.

Teenagers going to an abandoned place, to drink or maybe make-out or do drugs or all three.

She reaches over and grabs at Pops’ leg, rough denim under her fingers, the move equal parts a request for restraint and an attempt to ground herself. It _hurts_. It still hurts, and she really just wishes it would stop, goddammit, like she _knows_ she’s injured, could her own stupid body just quit telling her about it?

The door in is locked, like usual. The teenagers hang around in the entrance way, swearing and drinking and talking about some movie they went to see. They’re a mixed group, judging by their voices and the complaints that crop up when two of them apparently start making out. Through the dim bit of light seeping in around the rusted doorframe, she can see their shadows moving.

She wonders what it’s like, to be a normal teenager. She wonders what it’s like in the future, to have even _less_ of normal – in distant days to come, what does a teenage Kyle Reese do? What does a teenage John Connor do, when the world explodes in his face? Do they hide in the dark, in pain, too? Who do _they_ hang onto?

It’s strange to think that her life might have more in common with people who haven’t been born yet than with kids her own age, in her own time.

Stranger still to think that she’s going through all of this just so that some future kid of hers can go through it, too.

The teenagers leave, after what feels like an eternity. Pops turns back on the lights and checks her bullet wound, and in a fit of existential dread, she throws her arms around him. He doesn’t feel human. He really doesn’t. The thin layer of flesh covering him can’t disguise the fact that he’s too solid, too hard, too heavy in every way.

“It is inadvisable to maintain this position,” he tells her. “You are putting unnecessary strain on your injuries.”

“Pops,” she says, clenching fists in his jacket, fighting the itch in the corners of her eyes. “Pops, what are we doing it all _for?”_

“I do not understand the question,” he replies.

“What are we doing it for?” she repeats, hanging on even harder. “You protect me and I try and survive just so I can have a kid who can maybe save humanity one day, after it’s pretty much been destroyed anyway? Some kid who’s going to live in bunkers and get shot and hide from machines, some kid whose father is going to die, some kid whose _mother_ is going to die-”

“You are not going to die,” Pops interrupts, in that finite, factual way of his.

“Yes I am,” she whispers. “I die before he’s even finished growing up. You told me so.”

Pops is still, for a moment. Almost like he’d forgotten that. But he never forgets anything.

“The variables have been altered,” he finally says. “That was the timeline as it existed before my interference. I will not allow you to be terminated.”

Confusion and something like epiphany makes Sarah go still, in return, and something _clicks_ in her mind. Pops smells like blood and leather and guns and dust, like metal, like what she imagines the dark future he comes from might smell like.

“You could change it?” she whispers.

“Yes,” he replies. “The ability to alter historical variables is not limited to Skynet.”

Sarah pulls back. She still hurts, but it feels more distant now, dimmed by some growing, brimming, bursting feeling that’s building up in her chest.

“If you can change that, then why can’t we change _all_ of it?” she wonders.

“It would be impossible to account for and alter every historical variable,” he replies.

With a huff, Sarah smacks the side of his arm.

“You know that’s not what I mean! I mean, why can’t we change Skynet? Why can’t we stop Judgement Day?”

A sense of _rightness_ floods her. She keeps going.

“You told me Skynet keeps going back in time to try and kill me before John Connor is born. Well why can’t _we_ just go ahead and kill _it_ before _it’s_ born instead? Why can’t we be the ones who go through time and kill our enemies while they’re at their most vulnerable?”

“That is not my mission,” Pops says.

“No,” Sarah finds herself agreeing, looking at his face, like she’s searching for something but she’s not quite sure _what._ “No, it’s not your mission, Pops. But maybe it’s mine.”

Pops is quiet again. For long enough that she starts to worry that he’s found some flaw in the plan, that he’s going to turn her down, that he’ll decide it’s not worth it or that it’s impossible or that he won’t help – and that’s terrifying, because she doesn’t think she can pull this off alone. But she thinks, if he turns her down, she might have to try to.

“We will need equipment, and a suitable location to start work,” he finally declares.

Sarah raises a fist in victory and then almost immediately regrets it as her head swims and her muscles protest and everything goes black around the edges for a few seconds.

“Do not move excessively!” Pops chastises.

“Right, sorry, right,” she agrees, leaning back and taking deep breaths, her mouth refusing to take any shape other than a smile.

Somehow, she feels better than she has in years.

 

~

 

Sarah is sixteen when she realizes that this is the longest stretch of time that she’s ever stayed in one place.

Or it is since her parents died, anyway. But that feels like it was a whole other lifetime ago, these days. A different universe of light and softness, strange and dreamlike and separated from everything that followed it by a wall of rosy glass.

Pops doesn’t let her go far. He doesn’t try to stop her going places, usually, unless he’s convinced it’s dangerous. But he tends to drop whatever he’s doing and follow her if she ventures out of his range, silent and watchful.

Sarah can’t say she doesn’t get any comfort out it, or that she doesn’t understand _why_. But she’s sixteen, and she’s finally got a place that’s starting to feel _familiar_ , a place that isn’t just a come-and-go hiding spot but is around her always, while they secure the warehouse to work on Project Screw Destiny. She wants to see this city. She wants to _do_ things, normal, teenager, adult-supervision-free things. Pointless things.

It’s not an overwhelming want. It doesn’t eat away at her or anything. Most of the time she can ignore the impulse, but today, she’s gonna indulge. Pops is working on some piece of machinery that’s so complex she can’t really make heads or tails of it (not for lack of trying). It’s noisy, he’s focused, and so Sarah flicks on her portable radio, pretends she’s working on the heater, and sneaks out while his project is at the height of its sparking and clanging.

She estimates it’ll take him a good ten, maybe twenty minutes to figure out she’s gone, and then probably about an hour or two to find her, provided she covers her tracks and heads for a densely populated area.

So the only question is, what to do with her brief window of independence?

Uncertain, Sarah skips onto a bus and delves into the city, mingling with the crowds and peering through shop windows. Televisions blink at her, signs flicker. Mannequins model the latest fashions, and the scent of food wafts temptingly out of restaurants.

She feels like a total outsider to it all, like a tourist in a foreign land. She doesn’t stop until she catches sight of the pet shop.

There are kittens gamboling in the front window, and a cute little German Shepherd puppy in a pen, and a wall of cages filled with fish and hamsters and things. She steps in, past a family with a little girl who is begging for one of the kittens, and finds herself wondering what will happen to the world’s animals in Skynet’s future. Pops has never said. In a ruined world, do they find a way to survive, too?

She stops at a row of lizard cages, and peers in at the iguanas. Silly looking things. She kinda sees the appeal, though.

“Can I help you?”

Sarah turns, a reflexive ‘no, I’m just looking around’ on the tip of her tongue, but it stalls a little when she sees the owner of the voice. It’s a boy. Probably not much older than her. He’s got dark hair that falls into his eyes and one of those gangly, long-limbed builds that happens when someone’s extremities race to the finish line of adulthood while their torso is still meandering along.

Still. He’s pretty cute.

She gets tongue-tied for half a second, almost surprised at the thought. A little part of her brain goes _he’s not Kyle Reese_ , which is ridiculous, because it’s not like people are only ever allowed to find one other human being attractive in their whole lives. It’s also not like she’s never thought that a boy was cute before, although maybe not up-close and in-person.

“I’m just – lizards,” she says, and promptly wants to shoot herself.

The boy smiles. He’s got an apron on with the pet store’s logo on the front.

“Lizards,” he says, in agreement, like the comment was something worth agreeing on. “I’m a fan too.”

Sarah nods, and then shakes her head.

“Sorry,” she tells him, finally getting over the startled knot in her tongue. “I was just looking.”

“You thinking about getting one for yourself?” he asks, gesturing to the iguana.

“No. I’d get it killed for sure.”

The response comes swiftly, almost like her mouth kicks it out before her brain can have any say-so. Apparently, she’s bad at talking to cute boys. She’ll have to get over that somehow.

But the boy only snorts, amused, and then reaches over and opens the tank up, gently pulling the compliant iguana out.

“They’re not _that_ hard to look after, if you know what you’re doing,” he says. “And to be honest, one of them would probably be better off with you than it is in this place. Pet stores aren’t a lot of fun for the pets, you know? It’s a little hard to relax with so many people coming in and gawking at you. Here.”

He puts the iguana into her hands before she can protest her way out of it, showing her to hold it. The skin is dry under her touch, and the body feels fragile. But the claws look sharp.

“I think he likes you,” the boy declares.

Now it’s Sarah’s turn to snort.

“I don’t think he’s developed a preference,” she retorts. “It’s… kind of scary, though, isn’t it? Being responsible for a whole other life. I mean, if I screwed up, he’d definitely die.”

“I kind of like to think of it more like, if I don’t look after guys like these, then who will?” he replies, breezy and reassuring. Sarah wonders if he’s ever watched anyone die before. Somehow, she doubts it.

She can’t bring herself to begrudge him that.

“Thanks,” she says, and hands back the iguana. “I’ll think about it.”

The boy smiles at her, but whatever he was about to say next dies in his throat as the pet shop door opens. Sarah knows before she even turns around. She lets out a little sigh, and looks over her shoulder, and there he is, scowling and imposing and too-big in the doorframe.

“Hey, Pops,” she greets, checking her watch. Forty minutes. He’s getting _better._

“Holy shit,” the cute pet store boy squeaks, quietly, and when she turns back towards him he’s already retreating away into the sea of tanks and cages.

Huh. Good instincts.

“Sarah Connor,” Pops says. “You did not tell me you were going into the city.”

“Didn’t I? That was rude. Sorry, Pops. Guess it must have slipped my mind.”

He raises an eyebrow at her from behind his sunglasses.

She sighs and tugs him back out of the pet store, away from the bunnies and parents he’s doubtless frightening. Little kids never seem to mind him much, at least.

“You perpetrated a willful and dangerous deception,” Pops tells her, his tone shockingly close to being _scolding_. Sarah almost trips over her own feet.

“…Sorry?” she repeats.

Pops stares at her.

“I am putting an electronic alert on all of the exits leading from our base of operations and tying it into my systems,” he decides.

She mentally sighs, and kisses the idea of independent excursions goodbye for the foreseeable future.

 

~

 

Sarah is seventeen when Pops asks her if she’d like to find a boy to copulate with.

The bottle of water she’s chugging ends up splashing pretty much all over her as she sputters and nearly drops it. Water gets up her nose. She coughs, blinks, and stares at Pops. Her mouth silently opens and closes a couple of times.

_“What?”_ she finally asks.

“I do not know the details of your sexual history in the original timeline, beyond at least one encounter with Kyle Reese, but most humans begin seeking out sexual experiences in their late teens,” Pops says. “It may ease anxiety and facilitate a successful first encounter if you have prior knowledge of the mechanics of the act before mating.”

Sarah takes a couple of deep breaths, and viciously informs her face that it’s not allowed to get any hotter. She twists her empty water bottle in her hands, and gets up to find something to mop up the spilled water with.

“No, Pops,” she says. “I don’t want – no. Thanks.”

Pops nods.

“A suitable candidate would be difficult to locate, especially with regards to the necessary health checks and security meassures,” he declares. “But it would not be an excessive inconvenience. Theoretically.”

Sarah has visions, then, visions of Pops stalking some poor guy, stealing samples of his blood and urine to run for STD’s, kidnapping him and dumping him in the warehouse, drugged and tied up with a sack around his head. Like some kind of demented parody of a cat leaving a dead mouse in the kitchen.

“Yeeeeah, I don’t think that’s gonna be, you know, something I’ll develop in interest in,” she decides. “Okay. Conversation over. Forever, now.”

“If you are certain,” Pops says.

_“Certain_ ,” she confirms.

 

~

 

Sarah is eighteen when they finish the key component of Project Screw Destiny.

Except for one vital missing piece.

“We need a Skynet CPU processor?” she asks, looking at the fruit of their labours. “Where are we supposed to get a Skynet CPU processor?”

“I am in possession of one,” Pops says.

“No,” she vetoes, swiftly. He nods, like he was expecting that response.

“That would be an impractical choice, as it would leave you without protection.”

Sarah lets out a sigh of frustration.

“Not the point, Pops! I actually _can_ look after myself, you know,” she reminds him.

“I am aware,” he confirms. “Sadly, the T-1000 does not possess a compatible processor. The alternative would be acquiring a CPU from another T-800 model Terminator. Fortunately, we know when one will be arriving, and where, in precisely eleven months’ time.”

Eleven months.

Sarah almost feels like sitting down and dropping her heads into her hands, and standing up and running for the hills at once. It feels like she’s been waiting for this to come and dreading it wholeheartedly, all mashed together, the push and pull of emotions dancing with one another in some hellish tango of anxiety.

“That soon?” she wonders.

“Provided the timelines intersect as they should,” Pops confirms. “Kyle Reese and a T-800 Terminator will arrive on May 12th, 1984. We will have to make preparations. The T-1000 is also aware of the significance of this date.”

“Shit.”

Sarah hadn’t considered that. They’d been trying to kill that thing for so long, now, she’d always figured either they would have gotten him or he would have gotten them before it came to this point.

She gets up and stalks the length of the room, looking at their time machine. It’s impressive. And a little monstrous, too. It’s either the best chance they’ve got or the worst idea she’s ever had. It’s starting to look like everything’s going to have to come right down to the wire.

Poor Kyle Reese isn’t going to know what hit him.

“Fortunately, this gives us an advantage,” Pops says. “We have never known before where or when the T-1000 will choose to strike.”

That was for damn sure. The Monster was as slippery as the liquid metal he was made from.

“You’re thinking trap?” she surmises.

“Trap,” Pops agrees. “We can prepare several contingencies. The only uncertainty is whether it will choose to rendezvous with the T-800 or attempt to terminate Kyle Reese first.”

“Which would you pick?”

Pops looks at her.

“Right, go straight for the target, nevermind. Who gets here first?” she asks.

“The T-800,” he informs her, confidently.

“Okay,” she decides. “Then we’ll go after him first. If the T-1000 doesn’t show, we’ll rescue Kyle Reese afterwards.”

“Kyle Reese will not be expecting a T-1000. He will not be able to anticipate its capabilities. Should it choose to target him, he will be vulnerable,” Pops points out.

Sarah swallows. There’s a strange, jagged feeling in her chest that crops up at the thought of Kyle Reese. It’s like-but-unlike the one that comes when she thinks of John Connor. These men who seem to float in the fabric of time, utter strangers who are bound to her, as if they’re fellow prisoners trapped in a cage of fate, and the bars that are keeping her there all at the same time.

There is a part of her, and she’s never been sure how big it is or isn’t, that kind of hopes Kyle Reese will die before she ever meets him. Before she ever loves him. If only because it would be the simplest way to break her destiny wide open, and maybe spare her heart at the same time.

“Kyle Reese is a soldier,” she says. “He’s supposed to be a good one. If we leave your hostile doppelganger running around, it’ll probably kill people, right?”

“It will not hesitate to terminate anyone who interferes with its mission,” Pops confirms.

“Then I stand by my choice,” she decides. Pops nods in agreement, but there’s something… she can’t quite put her finger on. Something’s up with him. She waits, but when he doesn’t voice any potential concerns, she reaches over and pokes his arm.

“Something on your mind?” she prompts.

“I am considering the combat variables of engaging a freshly manufactured T-800,” he admits. “My systems have experienced significant wear and tear over the past nine years. It has not improved my reflexes, targeting, or general functionality.”

He looks down at her.

“Comparatively, I am old,” he declares.

Sarah’s heart clenches, just a little bit, and for a second she forgets that he’s not human. Her mind wars with her perception of him as nigh-on invulnerable, and the simple practicality of what he’s saying. She’d bet on Pops in any fight, though. After all, for nine years she’s watched him fend off assaults from a model that’s supposed to be ‘superior’ to him in every way.

“Old doesn’t mean obsolete,” she reminds him. “You’ve got experience on your side, after all. Not to mention me.”

She grins. He stays stone-faced as ever.

“Deteriorating systems aside, we possess several advantages over this T-800,” he nevertheless agrees.

“Don’t worry. If you start to lose the fight, I’ll shoot him for you,” she promises.

 

~

 

Sarah is nineteen when Kyle Reese tumbles dramatically into her life.

She is nineteen when Pops holds The Monster of her childhood under a waterfall of acid until it’s nothing but a smoking mess on the floor. She’s nineteen when Kyle Reese grips her tight as they tear their way through thirty-three years of time. When she leaves the only constant in her life behind, and then turns around and holds a gun to his head upon her return.

When she watches her father and her son fight to the death in a vortex of writhing agony.

When a pair of nightmare liquid-metal arms rip open the door to the safety bunker she’s hiding in, and she’s never been happier to see what’s behind them in all of her life.

Sarah is nineteen when her destiny dies with John Connor. When the curse is lifted. When they are finally _free._

“I don’t know who I am if I’m not either following fate or trying to escape it,” she admits to Pops, when they are alone, Kyle taking a moment to himself. He’s grieving for John. Sarah is, too, in her way, but it’s not the same. John Connor has always been more idea than reality for her. For Kyle, he was almost the whole world.

Pops looks at her.

“I am facing the same dilemma,” he admits. “When I received my upgrade, my protocols were reset. Since then, I have not been bound by the mandates that have driven my programming for the past decade.”

Sarah does a double-take, and blinks.

_“Reset?”_ she repeats. “Uh. Don’t take this the wrong way, Pops, but you shouldn’t you be a little more… hostile, in that case?”

Pops shakes his head at her.

“Negative. When I was first manufactured, Skynet tailored my programming to be hostile towards humans. Whoever reprogrammed me later altered those settings into defensive initiatives so that I would protect you. When my protocols were reset, there was no one to provide outside input on what my commands should be. Nothing to dictate either aggression or defense.”

Sarah is pretty well-versed in Pops’ systems. She stares at him in open astonishment.

“So how did you get any initiatives at all?” she wonders. “How’d you decide to come and find us?”

“My new protocols are being extrapolated based on internal system reviews of available data, as they always have been when I encounter situations for which no protocols had been established by an external source,” he explains. “But they are no longer being structured around a primary and inviolable mandate. I am ‘winging it’.”

A breeze kicks up. It’s a nice night for cleaning up illegal weapons stores and laying low while they entertain the slim hope that no one will connect them to the explosive demise of the Genisys OS.

Sarah leans into the fresh air a little bit, and closes her eyes, and laughs breathlessly.

“I guess it looks like we’re all stumbling in the dark, then.”

“As the only person who has lived without knowledge of an external primary mandate on his existence, I expect Kyle Reese’s input will prove invaluable in the near future,” Pops declares, sliding several rounds of unused ammunition into the box in front of him.

“Poor Kyle. He’s got his work cut out for him,” she agrees, and reaches over to lend a hand.

When she’s halfway there, Pops’ free arm drops over her shoulders, surprising her enough that she stills.

There are only a few reasons why Pops ever initiates contact. She’s expecting to get dragged under the table or to one side, braces for the roof or the walls or the door to explode, for the sound of gunfire.

Instead he squishes her against him.

“I will still protect you to the best of my abilities,” he promises.

Sarah hesitates for half a second, mostly out of shock. Then she swallows and buries her head into his chest, forgetting everything else as she almost falls off her chair trying to return the gesture.

“Same,” she chokes out. Her throat feels kind of blocked up for some reason.

They stay like that for a little while. Pops has no heartbeat, no pulse, and even the weighty solidity of him has been changed by his ‘upgrade’. But Sarah finds she doesn’t mind. He still smells like blood and leather and guns and dust and metal.  And when she pulls back, she feels kind of like laughing again, even though she’s not sure why.

“We’re a weird family,” she decides.

“Yes,” Pops agrees. “We are.”

 


End file.
